About Writing Software and other things…

So that’s it, after all together about 3 years working on and off on the DMT project, version 1.0 of the Data Moving Tool is finally out (check its features here and download it here). Here’s a brief flashback on how the idea came about.The setting

Over the years working as an IT consultant, I often came across situations where I needed to handle small to medium amounts of data. Say for instance an Excel file with a list of names that I needed to load in a database, or a list of items in a database I needed to transfer in another database. All these are very real life examples that seem trivial but aren’t that easy to accomplish after all.

The old way

Of course they might not be very straightforward, but there are plenty of ways to get this data across, after all, every database out there have their own proprietary import/export tools or wizards. But it quickly becomes over complicated when you have to juggle with all these tools (some database even have separate tools for import and export).

There’s got to be another way

There’s got to be another way to do this right? Well yes, there are ETLs. They’re designed just for that, Extract, Transform and Load data, just what we need! ETLs are great indeed, and they can do anything I might want to do with this data and way more. But they’re not exactly the right contestant for the job, they’re clearly over qualified and they’re very complex and often very expensive. It’s a bit like killing a fly with dynamite, common sense tells me there might be more appropriate ways to do it.

There’s got to be a better way

So I looked around for another solution. I though there had to be one out there. Some sort of tool that’s simple, flexible and cheap enough that can extract and load data in a straightforward way. Well the short answer is no. I found a few tools, but none that could do all I wished they would, the way I wished they would.

So being an IT guy with a lot of software design background, I just had to build it myself: a simple tool to seamlessly extract and load data across multiple data sources.

Here comes the Data Moving Tool

After 3 years working on and off on the DMT project, continuing my IT consultant business in parallel, I’m very proud to release the Data Moving Tool. I call DMT a micro ETL, it does everything you need to help you out in your data moving tasks:

Extract, Transform and Load data from/to any ODBC data source

Centralize all your data exports/imports in one place without the need for dedicated database tools